The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Friday, February 13, 2026
Holy Week 2024Censorship is falling upon the world like a gloomy darkness, from coordinated Lawfare at the highest levels of government used to destroy political opposition to the electronic control of an individual's emotions. Unelected powers demand complete control of the political narrative and threaten arbitrary, extrajudicial power over life and death.
We have seen deep states come and go throughout history and watched them become tyrannical when the people resisted. Deep states do deep-state things.
Welcome to Holy Week 2024: This is the most important time of the year for Christians, starting with Palm Sunday on March 24, 2024, and proceeding through Easter on March 31. We look at the deep state then and the deep state today. While the banal nature of today's events cannot, in any way, stand as significant as those from two millennia ago, there are some commonalities behind the motivations of the bureaucratic state.
Let's have a look…
We all suffer from Political Overload at times, but we cannot afford to poke our heads in the sand hoping it will go away! Here are links to what’s happening at the border; Congressional votes on social media; malfeasance by the CIA, Boeing, and Hamas (I’m sure that will surprise you – sarcasm font); the usual DC insanity; plus the economy. The best news is that we’re all here together!
[This Monday’s Archive is TTP’s celebration of St. Patrick’s Day with its “nutshell history” of Ireland, first written in 2006. Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all TTPers!]
Ronald Reagan’s origins are even more humble than Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin.
His great-grandfather, Michael O’Regan, was born in a hut of mud and slats in farmland called Doolis near the village of Ballyporeen, County Tipperary, in 1829.
In June 1984, Ronald Reagan came to Ballyporeen as President of the United States. In his speech to the townspeople in the village square, he said, “I can’t think of a place on the planet I would rather claim as my roots more than Ballyporeen, County Tipperary.”
A friend of mine was there as a member of Reagan’s staff. After the speech, the President commented to him, “I really am proud to be from here.” With a wink, he explained: “You see, I’m from Beyond the Pale.”
[The Existential Slap is what Dr. Nessa Coyle calls, “That moment “when a dying person first comprehends, on a gut level, that death is imminent. It changes everything. It is what Israel received on October 7, 2023, and America would be wise to wake up to that Slap, as well.
I beg your pardon for this graphic picture, but this is not a Hollywood shot. This is real. It happened. And it could happen here. **SLAP**]
On the morning of October 7, ordinary Israelis left their offices, closed their laptops, and abandoned their fields to pick up weapons, in many cases without waiting for instructions from the state or its army.
In 2001, Barack Obama said something interesting about the Constitution. It was, he said, “a charter of negative liberties” setting out what the government cannot do. That’s a very peculiar formulation because, rather than seeing the Constitution from the people’s viewpoint as a leash on tyranny, he saw it from the government’s viewpoint as an irritating restraint on its power. Today, when the Supreme Court heard oral argument in a pivotal free speech case arising from the government’s pressure on social media during COVID, Ketanji Brown Jackson made the same point, only more explicitly. These people really hate that you have the right to talk back.
We remember four years ago like it was yesterday. We remember how the COVID curtain came down, how the lockdowns were ordered, how the masking and the mandates were enforced, how our speech was curtailed, how our liberties were usurped. We remember how the lab-leaked China virus took control of our lives. And we wonder: Did we really learn our lessons?
Oh, sure, there's a general consensus that lockdowns are a bad idea and that vaccine mandates are unethical. But when the next pandemic comes around, will science once again give way to hysteria? Will Liberty take a backseat to tyranny?
One of the most important columns we've ever written, sadly, wasn't among our most well-read pieces. It was published on October 8, 2020, and it covered Donald Trump's brief battle with COVID. We remember the message he tweeted as he left Walter Reed Medical Center: "Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life." He was onto something.
Years before Covid, the scientist credited with eradicating smallpox warned against shutting down the world to combat an epidemic.
In 2006, ten years before his death at the age of 87, the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson laid out a plan for how public health officials should respond to a major influenza pandemic. It was published in a small journal that focused mainly on bioterrorism—and was quickly forgotten.
As it turns out, that paper, titled “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,” was Henderson’s prescient bequest to the future. If we had followed his advice, our country—indeed, our world—could have avoided its disastrous response to Covid.
U.S. — After former President Trump declared his freshly-made guacamole "the bomb", media outlets across the nation announced that Trump had threatened to drop a nuclear bomb if he were to lose the election.
"This is a clear call to civil war," cried MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough as video played of Trump eating chips. "You heard the words 'the bomb' from his very own lips. Is there nothing this madman won't do?"
Several media outlets reported that Trump's threat of nuclear war came immediately on the heels of Trump vowing to demolish democracy when he claimed he was "about to demolish" some tortilla chips. "We are sickened to hear such vile threats from former President Trump," said Scarborough. "Watch as Trump openly says he's about to 'slice and dice' tomatoes. Slice and dice? Trump is literally saying he plans to cut every one of his opponents into tiny pieces with a knife. Horrific!"
According to sources, the comments came after Trump served up his world-famous guacamole during fajita night at Mar-a-Lago. The guacamole, a family recipe for generations, was made tableside by Trump himself and described as "absolute dynamite" in addition to many other violent and obviously pro-insurrection phrases.
At publishing time, MSNBC had reported that Trump also planned to burn Democrats alive after revealing that Trump described the fajitas as "sizzling." - Babylon Bee reporting
Khasab, Musendam, Enclave of Oman, October 2006. The sharp tip of Arabia, known as the Musandam Point, sticks into the Persian Gulf, separating it from the Indian Ocean. The Strait of Hormuz is only 30 miles wide from Musandam Point to the coast of Iran, and through it passes a substantial fraction of the world's crude oil.
I came here to see the Persian smugglers. Go down to the wharves in Khasab and you will see them piled high with waterproof-wrapped bales of clothes, cases of soft drinks and juice, cartons of children's toys and electronic goods, an entire shopping mall of stuff, all ready to be crammed and tied down into 20 ft. long open speedboats with powerful outboard motors capable of outrunning Iranian Navy patrols.
There are dozens, scores, of waiting speedboats. The run from Khasab harbor to coves on the Iranian coast or the Iranian island of Qeshm takes about three hours. An average night will see dozens of speedboats racing across the Strait of Hormuz smuggling goods into Iran. The smugglers couldn’t have been more friendly to me. They hate the mullahs and are proud they are helping poor people in Iran. I had a great time with them. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #169 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
Ngorongoro Crater, Serengeti, Tanzania. Ngorongoro is one of the world’s great natural wonders, created over two million years ago when the cone of a gigantic volcano collapsed in on itself. The crater floor is over 100 square miles, teeming with African wildlife that includes the densest population of lions in the world. You’re only allowed to drive on certain dirt roads to see them, but lions sometime have different ideas. Here’s a lioness we found sunning herself on the hood of a Caterpillar road-grader, completely unconcerned by our presence. We spend a few days exploring Ngorongoro to cap off our safaris in isolated roadless areas of the Serengeti. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #286, photo ©Jack Wheeler)
On the remote north side of the island of Malekula in Vanuatu, there lives a cannibal tribe called the Big Nambas. The men wear a penis gourd wrapped in pandamus fibers, and eat “man long pig,” cooked human enemies. You have to trek over mountains of thick jungle to reach them. When I was able to years ago, there were a few men who continued the practice. This gentleman is one of them. I was in no danger as they were very kind and gracious to me.
That wasn’t the case a century ago when the first explorers, Martin & Osa Johnson, reached them. Their 1918 film, “Cannibals of the South Seas,” made the Johnsons famous, and you can see it on YouTube. Today they are far more benign. It is an extraordinary experience to meet a culture of fearsome reputation and realize they are people like you and me. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #103 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
10,000 years ago, the Sahara was green, with lakes, rivers, and such an abundance of animals it was a hunting paradise for people who lived here. You’ll find their petroglyphs carved on to rock outcroppings like this that my son Jackson and I found on a Trans-Sahara Expedition in 2003.
The Milankovitch astronomical cycles that drive Earth’s climate produced a West African monsoon that greened the Sahara back then. When the cycles shifted ending the monsoon, the Sahara turned dry desert as it remains today. Political cycles that permitted a peaceful crossing of the world’s greatest desert have also shifted, making this too dangerous now.
A Trans-Sahara Expedition is one of the world’s great adventures. Hopefully, one will be possible again in the not-too-distant future. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #7 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
St. Finnbarr’s Oratory, Gougane Barra, County Cork. St. Finnbarr (550-623) is the patron saint of the city of Cork, now Ireland’s second largest city, on the south coast of the Emerald Isle. He established this tiny church in the late 500s, and has been built and rebuilt on a small island on Lake Gougane, with the one you see finished some 150 years ago.
Gougane Barra is a remote valley distant from Cork, almost uninhabited, of legendary beauty. The oratory or chapel has been a holy place of summer pilgrimage for Christians for fifteen centuries, revered for its complete serenity and peacefulness. Rarely visited outside of summer due to its remoteness, you may have this holy place all to yourself. Here is where you come to rest and reinvigorate your soul. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #218 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
Democrats always accuse their enemies of what they themselves are guilty of, right out of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules For Radicals.” Democrats have been beating the “Trump is a danger to Democracy” drum because it is all they have in their war chest with Biden as their candidate. It is actually the Democrats that are the real threat to freedom of speech, the 2nd Amendment, and our constitutional republic as a whole.
